


Life in colour

by thinfacedknave



Category: LazyTown
Genre: Grief/Mourning, Lazytown AU, M/M, Physical Disability, References to Depression, Slow Burn, dads
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-01-20
Updated: 2017-02-02
Packaged: 2018-09-18 18:47:54
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 10
Words: 20,874
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/9398264
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/thinfacedknave/pseuds/thinfacedknave
Summary: Rob is a reclusive widower, his young daughter Steffi is an active and bright child, but the two struggle to relate to each other. Steffi starts leaving stories about a fantastical town around the house for her dad to find, and slowly Rob begins to see life In colour once again. What's more, they may not simply be stories.





	1. Colouring pens

**Author's Note:**

> Thanks for reading. I haven't written fic in about 7 years, and started this one after waking up from a particularly bad dream at 4am.
> 
> This one's a pretty slow burn, but I promise it emerges from the tunnel!

Steffi was 7 when she started leaving her stories around the house for me to find. It was very much like her that no sooner had she graduated from pencil to a chunky handwriting pen she was already ambitious to knock out a classic.

Handwritten on a few torn out pages of a little diary she’d been given for Christmas, the first one was barely 3 pages if I remember. I’m sorry to say that I don’t still have it for obvious reasons. Neither do I know exactly when she wrote it, because she left it in my study, and when I finally saw it among the towering and unsorted stacks of books, journals and newspapers I’m ashamed to admit that I had no idea how long it had been lying there.

I recall the subject matter, however. She wrote about a girl named Stephanie, who was very much like her, who wanted to go to a dance competition but whose limbs were all stiff. Then there was a drawing of story Stephanie, stiff-limbed and sad as she resigned herself to missing the competition. I have to say this stung particularly with recent events in mind, as she’d begged and begged to be allowed swimming lessons that year when all her friends started with the school. They rang me once on the day she’d been found attempting to stow away on the bus with her schoolmates, When I asked them if there was any way they could just take her they said something about insurance and liability. After those sorts of words start hovering around a conversation I often find there’s not a great deal else of use to be done so I accepted it. Steffi didn’t, and was monstrous about the whole thing for a couple of months. However, this was ancient history now as far as a seven-year-old is concerned, and her mood had greatly improved recently. Still, my first instinct was that she was punishing me with this precocious little pamphlet.

But all was not lost. On page two, a hero comes to her rescue. He wasn’t named yet; at this point she just called him ‘The Sports Elf’, and his arrival was heralded by a sour and unpleasant smell as I turned the page. There he was, a scratchy but identifiable drawing of a man flexing his muscles in the typical ‘strong man’ pose, and the drawing had been smeared with a yellow paste that upon sniffing was undoubtedly mustard. That explained a few things about the tangy aroma in here lately that I’d been chalking up to my own slipping hygiene standards. I rarely lived out of my dressing gown in those days. Our neighbour Bessie was more than happy to take Steffi to school most of the time, among her many little acts of kindly enabling which, sullenly I’d grown to depend upon. And so, void of motivation six days a week I wrapped myself up in my comforting purple gown and shuffled around the house, muttering to myself with a restless languor that bordered on the manic. It was not, all things considered, a great time.

In the third act of this little saga, the Elf somewhat brutally took Stiff Stephanie by the limbs and stretched her out until she was dancing at top form. She went on to win the competition in front of the whole town, and gain an enormous trophy.

There she stood on her own two feet, beaming as only a dot-eyed illustration can, with her muscular surrogate father standing proudly behind her. Whoever he was, this ‘Sports Elf’, he certainly wasn’t me.

“Did you write this?” I asked, somewhat redundantly, I admit.

She could sense at once that her efforts may not had been appreciated in the way she’d hoped and I let the guilt of that sting me. And it did more than sting when, honest child that she always was, she owned up to the mustard-stained sheets.

“You know you’re not supposed to come into my study, don’t you?” She nodded solemnly, her eyes on the lego bricks she’d been tinkering with when I found her. “And you can’t leave food lying around. It’ll make us sick!” I could see tears brimming in her eyes. God, in times like those it was like I was somewhere else in the room, watching a hunched, hollowed-out man berate a child for daring to be creative. I watched him recoil as tears broke their surface tension and fell down her cheeks, and I cursed him as he hesitated to comfort her, still gripping the pages that had pricked his ridiculous pride. Dark purple circles under his eyes, greasy-haired, poorly shaven. God, how he disgusted me. And as he turned and swept out of the room, I was almost still in there with her, her industrious building halted as I spread my fetid stagnation to the only thing in this house that didn’t seem to have mushrooms growing on it.

All the same, I don’t exactly regret throwing away the sour pages. As much as I would love to have them now, they were disgusting. And it wasn’t until I was throwing them away that it occurred to me why she’d done this slightly bizarre thing. She didn’t have any colouring pens.

The next day was a working day for me, in as much as I had to go to the campus, give a couple of lectures, and make myself available for office hours. I woke up in my office at 16:30 to find a note had been slid under the door.

“I knocked for you but you weren’t available, we will need to reschedule my tutorial. - Sterling”

There was a post-script:

“P.S. Father says nasal strips help with snoring.”

Passive-aggressive little shit. I tried to remember which one “Sterling” was and whether that was a first name or a surname.

On my way home I stopped off at a stationery store to stare at an enormous box of colouring pens. There were colours in this collection that I couldn’t recall having seen for perhaps decades. I spent a good twenty minutes just marvelling at their wondrously absurd names. “Mystic Lake Blue”, “Charred Ochre”, “Yellow Dawn”, “Flamingo Passion”. They were so pretty that it made me sad. 

I had them on the back seat when I went to pick Steffi up from the Nurse’s office where she waited after school on my campus days. None of the after-hours activities they ran at her school had struck me as quite safe, so this was the arrangement. She spotted the pens as I helped her into the car, but said nothing for the whole drive. When we reached the house and I went to help her out of the car, she took my arm as normal, eyes on the floor.

“Aren’t you going to bring your pens?” I asked her.

“They’re for me?” She said, looking at me, her eyes widening. Did she honestly believe I’d bought a box of colouring pens just to torture her? Is that the sort of man she thought I was?

“Of course they are.” I replied, swallowing that nasty thought. “Make sure you don’t forget them.” But she’d already grabbed them, her eyes shining as they took in the rainbow of possibility she’d just been presented with. And as we went into the old grey house that day, it seemed a starker contrast than ever to the beautiful and bright world Steffi seemed to inhabit; a world I had glimpsed in that that box of “Magnificent Magenta” “Red Rascal” and… “Purple Majesty”.

I knew things had to change, but I didn’t know how. You knew, though. In that frustrating way that you always do.


	2. Ballet shoes

When Steffi told me that she was going to be a dancer, I felt the bottom of my stomach fall into an elevator shaft.

The stories had been coming regularly for six months now, and I hoarded them greedily. The elf now had a name; Sportacus. I had laughed out loud when I first read it. God knows where she learned about Spartacus, or if she even really knew who that was. And he continued to be the perfect father that I was not. He played with her, and saved her and her friends from a multitude of scrapes in their technicolour town. Instead of mustard-yellow he was now blue - the brightest blue conceivable - and Steffi’s alter-ego was pink, hair and all! I would be lying to say that her clear preference for this fictional fay didn’t continue to grind on me, but I couldn’t blame her. I had palpitations some days climbing the stairs. On other days I barely made it out of bed, and blearily I’d microwave her breakfast and tie her shoes while she indulged me with a sort of pitying silence, and smiled broadly at me as Bessie hurried her out the door. Sometimes that smile would give me the energy to climb back up the stairs into my bed, or sometimes I would only make it to the armchair before heavy, suffocating sleep came over me. 

I hadn't been entirely forgotten, however. There had been another arrival in her stories who’d been making his presence felt for a while now, a gangly figure all in purple. He lived under the town, napped most of the time, disapproved of physical activity and had something of a sweet tooth. The portrayal was uncanny, and strange as it may seem, not entirely unflattering either. He was smart; always cooking up schemes and running absurd cons on the people of the town. He was charming in an audacious, rascally kind of way, and he was very sharply dressed. I still wasn’t sure how I felt about my own daughter seeing me as the villain in her story, but there were worse villains to be and at least her villain was clean and dapper and got out a lot more than his real counterpart.

It was the thought of this purple menace that held my normally erratic temper at bay when she told me. She’d expressed interest in sports before. Every few months she’d shuffle up to me and proffer some permission slip or other for soccer, or netball, or some other afterschool activity. When I was in a good place, I even used to call the school and argue a case for her to be able to join in. I was even successful once in getting a reluctant coach to allow her on the kids’ softball reserve team, on the agreement that she would be sat out for most of the game and would at most have one or two turns at hitting with a substitute runner. She wasn’t happy about this, she wanted to play properly, but these were the terms and she joined the team. This dubious arrangement carried on for three weeks, and every Thursday when she stayed at school after hours to practice I found I could do nothing with myself. I used to sit in my chair and think about her, clutching a bat, wobbling on the edge of the diamond. I thought about the other kids, her substitute runner, annoyed that she was slowing down the pace of the game, not understanding the need for them to include her. I thought about the laughs after she missed three hits and struggled back to her seat, and I couldn’t take it. I pulled her out without even having gone to a game. My nerves betrayed me.

This was a while ago now. Steffi was in many ways a different child. She said she was going to be a dancer and that was that. What had I done wrong? Was it my fault for taking her to shows when she was little? Or the fact that I still kept her mother’s ballet shoes hung over the back of my study door? In my panic it hadn’t occurred to me that most little girls want to be ballerinas, and that this was a perfectly natural phase. Besides which, looking back now I know that it wasn’t. For a kind and often wise child, she had these moments when a steel door would clang down over her brown eyes and she would not be crossed. This was one of those moments.

“Papa, when I grow up I’m going to be a dancer.”

I spilled my coffee on my lap. Luckily it was cold.

“Steffi, you know dancing is incredibly difficult...” She shook her head.

“No, it’s easy, see?” She pushed herself onto her feet, and supporting herself with one hand on the mantlepiece, put her feet as close to first position as she was able and cupped her arm into an arc. “I’ve been practising.”

I gaped at her, and that same feeling washed over me as I’d felt knowing she was at Softball practice. Years of sorrow, pain and eventual disappointment that I wouldn’t be able to bear to see her go through. Wouldn’t they all just pity her? Her Blue Elf wouldn’t have minded. He would have said “That’s fantastic, Stephanie! As long as you try your best, that’s the most anyone can ask. You can be a dancer as long as you practise every day!” (He did always seem to be shouting.) But I was not her blue marble Adonis, I was her real flesh and blood father and I was on the verge of some kind of attack.

“But what if there are some moves you just can’t do?” I asked her, struggling to keep my voice from shaking. “Wouldn’t it be better to try something else? Something where you get to sit down?”

“This IS something else, Papa! I can do it. I’ll practise until I can do it.”

“Steffi-”

“Wasn’t Mama a dancer?” I froze. She knew immediately she’d said the wrong thing. I was ejected from my body with the speed of a bullet train and barely remember what happened next, curling myself against the harshness in my own voice.

“Mama was different. You can’t be a dancer, it’s too dangerous! And what if you break your crutches, you know those are very expensive? I can’t pay for you have special lessons, and that is final.”

That was the gist of it, anyway. The whirring panic in my mind has still blocked my full recollection of the scene, and even after all this time, Steffi and I don't talk about how things really were back then. I don't think you'd have liked me at all. 

When I got back to my study, my hands shaking, I barely got the door shut before tears came. Great, elemental sobs that convulsed through me. I really was rotten. A lazy teacher, a pathetic sham of a father. My book was so long overdue that the University had stopped asking about it. I saw so little sunlight that my skin had turned grey. These sobs coursed through me like dry heaves, I felt myself hit the carpet. Dislodged newspapers and academic journals tumbled around me, covering me, burying me.

The next thing I remember is paramedics. Steffi found me and called an ambulance. It was surprising to see so much blood from what turned out to be such a small head wound, courtesy of the corner of my desk. In the ambulance on the way to the hospital, my eyelids drooping, holding a wad of cloth my head, a young paramedic spoke to me as he took my blood pressure with some gizmo.

“Have you thought about a stairlift?”

“Huhh…?” I drooled.

“For you daughter. Must be tough climbing all those stairs on crutches.” He indicated towards the cab where Steffi was sitting up front with the driver. My guilt fought with my exhaustion and I looked away, tamping down the desire to throw up.

“She doessn’ wan’ one.” I replied. “Sh’doesn’ wan’ to be diff’rent.” He nodded.

“Well I guess I can understand that. Though you might want to think about who’s looking after who in that house. When I saw the state of it I thought about calling it in as a safeguarding.”

“Safeguardin’?”

“You know, family services type thing. She’s a happy girl, though. I see a lot of houses, and yours is by no means the worst. Still, you should clear it up, it’s not a great environment for a disabled child, and think about getting some help for yourself.”

“I jus’ tripped... My wife is dead.” I don’t know why I said that. It wasn’t exactly relevant. “When Steffi wasss… 2.”

He was silent for a few moments. The light strip on the ceiling of the ambulance caught his glasses in such a way that they gleamed opaque white. He wore strange glasses, more like wrap-around lab goggles, slightly tinted. I wondered if he had some kind of sight problem.

“I’m sorry. That’s rough.” I nodded. “It’s no excuse, though.” 

Ouch. I closed my eyes. 

“Hey, wake up!” He was shaking me. “You’ve got to stay awake for the next twelve hours. If you don’t, that girl might not have a father anymore, do you understand?”

I understood. I understood everything he said, though I pretended not to.


	3. Needle and Thread

Sterling’s dissertation tutorial was running long on that day. I still hadn’t decided whether that was his first or second name. It was Spring then and about ten months after I’d been introduced to the colourful cast of what was now called “Lazytown”. Steffi was 8.

How to address this? Nothing remained of the head wound other than a faint white scar, a tiny comma on the left side of my otherwise expansive forehead. 

But not nothing. 

We'd crossed something of a threshold and I don't want to be too blasé about it. I should have asked that young paramedic's name, or gone and seen him sometime. It wasn't just that I stayed awake for the next 12 hours, Steffi pinching my arm in an anxious death grip, but that I somehow managed to wake up. While waves of drowsiness pushed down on my skull, and the colours of the world wiggled and squirmed under my gaze, I turned my head to her and saw not her usual mousy bob, but the most glorious, fantastic pink I had ever seen. The hospital curtains glowed an alpine green so vivid I could almost smell it. And coming home, my eyelids heavy, the little grey house seemed more like silver. Chrome! Everything seemed to have been knocked into strange angles, door frames warped and softened into jolly, drunken archways. And the purple! The purple that had seeped into every decorating decision we'd made when we bought this house - the purple that over 5 stagnant years had turned to scummy grey - suddenly gleamed richly and mysteriously.

The next morning, the colour all but faded to its usual homogenous pallour, I thought about my concussion-induced insight into what could only have been the world as Steffi saw it. And I couldn't... I just couldn't let us continue to live in parallel universes this way. So I did what the young man in the glasses recommended, that had seemed such a drastic and exhausting prospect. I got myself some help, and after a difficult adjustment period and some extended sick leave that I don’t especially want to relive, I was now on medication.

“But what about MY analysis, isn’t that important, too?” He demanded. He was the only student I knew who came to classes exclusively in a suit. A sort of light-tan ensemble that, if paired with a bushy moustache and Pith hat wouldn’t have looked out of place in Colonial India.

“Yes, your analysis is the basis of the dissertation, but you need to reference your sources, otherwise it’ll be considered plagiarism.”

“But it’s MY dissertation. I don’t see why other people should get the credit for it.” This discussion was going nowhere, and I needed to pick Steffi up from the Nurse’s office. In recent months I’d relieved Bessie of some of her obligation to take Steffi to school four days a week. It hadn’t been easy to rend this task from her grip, and emerging from my funk of self-obsession as I had been lately, for the first time I noticed that she might be lonely. I’d always seen this blue-rinsed, five foot nothing matronly figure as rather comic, but looking at her with fresh eyes; her full face of make-up at 8am, her exquisitely tidy house and long list of telephone acquaintances, I felt I may have misjudged her. God knows I still didn’t really want to have to talk to her, but I endeavored to be friendly even when dodging her searching questions, and she really did make excellent cakes.

I suppose I was able to notice the signs of loneliness in her, because for the first time in a long time, I’d also begun to notice them in myself. It was something like finally lifting myself off the ground high enough to feel a breeze. If the breeze had been there before, I was too busy clutching the earth in terror to notice. 

It wasn’t just the care of Steffi that could be arduous on a single parent; cooking, caring for and cajoling a child is one thing without crutches, insurance and physiotherapy to be thinking about, but we managed. It was that for the first time since Steffi was 2, I had felt the absence of a person in a way that wasn’t grieving, but hoping. The idea of getting involved with someone else, a thought that had once made me feel almost physically sick, now breezed through and through me with a slight thrill. Not that I’d taken any steps. Where does one even begin? My circumstances weren’t exactly conventional to start with. 

I never thought I’d fall in love with a woman. When Steffi’s Mama and I got married it was to the shock and awe of a great many of our friends and acquaintances. And why not? What interest could this gorgeous, intense, abrasive ballerina have in some skinny boy in purple eyeshadow? And the things that had obsessed me up to that point about myself; my sexuality, my flamboyance, the way I was perceived versus the way I wanted to be perceived, all melted away with her. I was simply going to be her husband until I died, and I’d never have to think about any of those things ever again.

The stories were, I think, partially to blame for my introspection.

She couldn't have known this, but when Steffi drew me as “Robbie Rotten” is was like looking back in time. He didn’t slob around all day. Even his dressing gown was fancy. It occurred to me as Steffi’s drawing skill improved and her pictures became more detailed, that I recognised the purple waistcoat that she had dressed my alter-ego in. It was from an old photo of me at University, the height of my overdressing phase. A beautiful two-tone 70s purple striped three-piece found in a vintage store, that I’d altered myself to fit my lanky body. The legs had been slightly too short, ditto the waistcoat, but I loved it. It’s strange proportions suited very well the way I thought about myself. I was, in retrospect, a little embarrassed for my younger self, but the idea of having that sort of confidence nowadays felt like insanity. It struck a chord, and one day I ventured up into the loft and there it was, the old relic, lying among a pile of clothes, both mine and my wife's, that nobody had looked upon for years.

It didn’t fit. Of course it didn’t fit. A certain amount of weight gain had come with the medication. I was looking healthier for it, but I wasn’t going to be fitting into anything i’d worn at 21. There were other garments, though. Nice garments. I used to be quite the thrift shopper, and there were things here that still had pins stuck in them from planned alteration work. I couldn’t believe I’d never made anything for Steffi. When I found out I was going to be father to a little girl, it was all I could think about. Perfect little dresses, bows, ruffles. The time had just slipped away and I couldn’t remember the last time I’d bothered to pick up a needle and thread.

I was wearing one of my old/new outfits on that day. I’d been wary about dressing up to work, my fears based around the simple adolescent principle that maybe the kids would laugh at me, but spurred on by Steffi’s adoration of my sartorial renaissance I’d dared a waistcoat today. She’d wanted to paint my nails but I drew the line. She could do it at the weekend, but it was still a little too much for a man who until recently had sometimes worn his slippers to work. In reality, the only real difference my return to flashy dressing made was that it became more difficult for me to claim that students hadn’t seen me plough through three slices of cake at the Humanities cafeteria when my purple velvet jacket made me a rather unmistakable presence.

“- And MY view is that money is money and the distinction between old and new makes absolutely no sense whatsoever.”

“What?” I asked, breaking back into this punishing tutorial. Sterling made a noise of frustration, somewhere between a gasp and a growl. I stifled a laugh. He got to his feet.

“You know I pay a great deal for my education here, and if you’re not going to take it seriously, I will talk to my father about it.” Oh, so he was one of those students.

“Well, if that’s how you feel Ste- Mr. Sterling, then I’ll gladly talk to him over the phone and explain that in 7000 words of your dissertation on..." I glanced at the paper in front of me. "...'expressions of wealth in the early 20th century novel', you don’t cite a single source. Not even the texts you’re supposed to be studying.”

He huffed. A picture-perfect huff, his lip curling up as he folded his arms like a petulant little boy. I thought ‘I know you, Sterling. I know your bland, entitled view that whatever you can take should be yours. I know your puny self-awareness, and fear that you’ll never have enough, never be enough to make people really like you. I've been there, kid. And that means I know how to call your bluff.’

“Resubmit your draft to me with adequate references, and we can talk about your feelings on new money next week. I think this tutorial is over.”

As he left he muttered something more about potential litigation, but his heart wasn’t in it. Before I rushed out the door I very quickly pulled up his student record in case I was to receive an angry call from a parent. I found that Sterling was indeed a surname, and the reason he went exclusively by it was because the poor soul had been christened ‘Stingy’. Stingy. Was that short for something? If my father had called me Stingy, I daresay I’d milk him for all he was worth until the day he died, too.

I drove fast to Steffi’s school, convinced I was late but ended up through a coincidence of traffic lights being five minutes early. Being early was something of a novel concept to me. I was looking forward to not receiving my customary eyeroll from the school nurse as I approached her office, but something was wrong. The office was locked. This had never happened before and I immediately visualised the worst. Steffi had been rushed to hospital and nobody had called me. Why wouldn’t they call me? Easy Rob, because they don’t trust you to look after your own daughter, they’re going to call a ‘safeguarding’ this time and you’ll never see her again. I swallowed and started through the corridors.

“Steffi?” I called my voice coming out quavery, addressing the empty halls. I stopped. This was ludicrous, I’d simply go to the reception desk and ask. I went back the way I came, heading towards the school’s main reception. I passed the gym. 

Wait....

I had to double back in order to really believe what it was I had just seen through the window in the door.

It was the elf. 

Steffi’s elf. Sportacus. He was leading a small class of children in some sort of aerobic dance. It’s hard to say how I knew these two entities were the same, when one was a dot-eyed drawing in a blue hat and the other a short but muscular PE teacher. It was something about the smile. About the air of calm, kind authority that hovered around him, and the spell he had these children under. The spell he had me under. For all that I had resented Sportacus for usurping my place as Steffi’s role model, I had never doubted that he was the role model she deserved. But could it be that he was not something her imagination had conjured to cover up the failings of an inadequate father, but rather a real person who had come into her life? It was, I will admit, overwhelming. He was beautiful. And I realised he was looking right at me.

I jolted away from the window. Stupid man. Gazing through windows at children; that’s a good way to get yourself arrested. And Steffi was still missing. And now you’ve just reacted like a startled cat you seem even more suspicious, he’s probably calling the police right no-

“Hello!”

He was standing in the hallway, holding a hand out towards me.

“You’re Steffi’s Papa, yes?”

He had an accent. I hadn’t expected him to have an accent, but his plain, loud way of speaking was familiar to me. Less familiar were his chipped-ice blue eyes and wavy blond hair, his gleaming white teeth and the lean, shapely muscles of his arms. I took his hand like a person anticipating touching an electric fence, and his firm grip thrilled through me at 10,000 volts.

“Yes. Rob.”

“Rob?”

“Yes.”

“Not Robbie?”

I felt myself flush. So I wasn’t the only person who Steffi was sharing her stories with. 

“Ahah… Well I… And you’re… well, you must be. I’m afraid I don’t know what your name is other than-”

“Sportacus!” I laughed. I couldn't help it. He shrugged. God, his shoulders. “It’s a nickname. Something the kids call me. Most of them can’t pronounce my name.”

“I see. Is… You don’t happen to know where Steffi is, do you?” I asked, downplaying the fact that I’d lost track of my offspring. He responded immediately, beaming.

“Of course, she’s just inside!” He put a hand on my back and steered me towards the door of the gym where he pointed her out. “She’s practising her routine.”

"Her wha-..." As I saw her, my heart clenched into a fist.

Steffi’s face was a steel mask of focus, her arm made an elegant, swan-like arc as her crutch dangled from her elbow. Then, placing both crutches on the ground she swung herself round, one knee sliding to the ground, her other leg stretched behind her. He arms twisted above her head before she folded her entire body forward. Using her arms she flipped herself over into a sitting position, and rolled over her side, engaging the crutches with the floor at just the right moment to push herself to her feet in one smooth, graceful movement.

I could see the slight tremor in her elbows as she supported her full weight on them, the pink in her cheeks from the physical exertion. The knot in my chest twisted. I could see the way she swung her weak legs into shapes strong legs could make with minimal effort. I could see the delicate line of her arm, and the way her eyes followed her fingertips. Then I couldn't see anything, because I had started to cry.

The elf man patted me on the back and called out to Steffi. When she saw me, she must not have known what to think. She slunk over, unsure, perhaps believing that this was the moment of reckoning for her months of disobedience. I couldn’t bear to draw out her uncertainty. I ran to her and scooped her up in a way I hadn’t done for many years, holding her tight against me. Crying hotly into her tiny shoulder.

“Papa…” She exhaled, clearly startled.

“I’m so proud of you.” I whispered “I love you so much.” She sunk into me then and nuzzled into my shoulder. My perfect, tough, tenacious little daughter. How could a man like me deserve to live his life alongside such a beautiful soul?

I don’t know what you must have been thinking in that moment. Or when you bid us farewell that evening with a bemused smile, father and daughter an emotional wreck. I think we both already loved you.


	4. Window Shopping

Why am I like this? Don’t answer that. 

Everything else occurred very naturally. I made an appointment with Steffi’s doctor and her physiotherapist to discuss the dancing and how she could best be supported in continuing it. We cleared the living room of everything breakable so she could have space to practice. We had a short but ultimately unconstructive discussion about lying; that it’s all very well when I do it, but she really ought to try not to. 

The knot of dread which accompanied any thought of Steffi taking on physical challenge was loosening, perhaps even unwinding. And with it we unwound. She started talking in a way I’d never known her to talk before. Recently I'd been privy to her thought processes only through her Lazytown stories. She started, for want of a better term, to prattle. Her voice filled my ears, filled any room we shared with stories about dance training, how when she’d started she could barely bend her knees, and how her arms were weak and inflexible. Each story was accompanied by wild gesticulation and many examples of the moves described while I collected fragile heirlooms in my arms and ducked flying crutches. And when she wasn’t talking about dancing she was talking about you.

You had arrived after summer last year, to replace a retiring P.E. teacher. When Principal Meanswell introduced you to the school, you did a backflip right then and there in the school hall, followed by some one-handed press-ups. Steffi was among those who struggled to pronounce your name; when I asked her to she turned pink and stared at the floor, finally muttering a word that sounded like ‘Ibuprofen’ and refusing to try it again. So Sportacus you became, and it had stuck to you like glue ever since. You were from Iceland. Your favourite food was apples. Your favourite colour was blue.

“Enough, Steffi! I need to concentrate.”

She was stood in the door of my study, leaning against the doorframe. She’d been telling me for perhaps the fifth time how you’d seen her watching your dance aerobics class in the gym on her late days and invited her to join in. How when she told you she wanted to be a dancer, you’d smiled so wide she thought you looked like the Cheshire Cat.

But now she’d fallen silent. That old silence.

“Why don’t you go and draw something?” I tried. She nodded, closed the door and scuttled off. I went back to my laptop. A stern e-mail about my research grant had scared me back to the book I started 6 years ago and for the last week I’d been ploughing through years of neglected research notes, trying to make sense of the working processes of a man I barely recognised. My brain - much like the rest of me - had become a soft, under-exercised ball of pastry.

And of course, I couldn’t stop thinking about you. 

This is what I mean. Why am I like this? In some ways it takes a great deal of effort to really double down on those nasty intrusive thoughts, and as flabby and useless as my torpor had left my academic mind, my brain’s centre for manufacturing problems probably had muscles bigger than yours. Because in the six days since we’d met, I’d managed to convince myself that you were an arrogant, swaggering, blowhard jock who I didn’t like at all.

It didn’t happen immediately. I listened hungrily at first to the details about you that Steffi had memorised. I would listen to her talk, and flex my fingers as a phantom crackle of electricity buzzed through them at the memory of your handshake. I sat up in my chair at night, unable to sleep and I thought about you. I ran through and through our short conversation, bringing to mind your voice, your inflection, your bright eyes. I dissected the lifting feeling in my chest until my body felt like an abstract entity of aches and rushes. I thought about your hands, and your lips and the shape of your shoulders until quite suddenly a shame descended over me so profound that I thought I was going to heave. I paced around the ground floor at night. Who did you think you were? Steffi was enamoured of you, but I wasn’t a little girl, I could see through your charm. Just another musclebound meathead who think he knows what’s best for everyone. Who thinks he knows what’s best for my family. Giving dancing lessons in secret. Not even a phonecall to the parent. Such presumption. Such arrogance.

It was a couple of hours later that evening, when my eyes were crossing and I decided to give up deciphering this incomprehensible draft and go make dinner, that I found Steffi had left me a gift. It was lying outside my study; the newest issue of ‘Lazytown’. This was the first issue I had received since finding out that Sportacus was not entirely a figment of my daughter’s imagination. Suddenly the whole thing felt a little less wholesome. Why had she begun writing about him? Why did she specifically think that I needed to read about him? I brought the pages inside and started reading. Her drawing was getting so good. The simple earnest sweetness of Lazytown filled me as before and my suspicion softened. These were just stories, no matter what they were inspired by, this Sportacus might as well have been a figment of Steffi’s imagination for all he could possibly have in common with the man I met six days ago. People like Sportacus don’t exist, and that jumping Icelander was no elf, he had a real name (albeit one no human tongue could pronounce) and a house somewhere and probably a wife. He was no more a genuine part of our lives than any other cartoon character Steffi watched on a Saturday morning. I had just about rationalised the whole thing away when I turned the last page.

My whole face suddenly superheated. A full-page illustration accompanied the conclusion of the story. Sportacus grinning a broad grin while I (well, not me, my avatar I suppose) was cradled in his arms in an unmistakable bridal lift. The kids from the story were all around, laughing and smiling and waving their arms, and Steffi’s alter-ego, standing unsupported, looked nothing short of delighted.

I put the pages down, my heart beating double time. Was this… her plan? No. That was an insane thought. Depressive people often get the idea that there’s a conspiracy going on around them, I just hadn’t been getting out enough lately. My insomnia and fixation had been allowing spiders and dustballs to creep back into my brain…

… But there it was! In full colour; blue and purple. Was Steffi window shopping for a new parent? Had she been presenting these stories to me as a sort of advertisement for her preferred brand of stepfather, like children leaving magazine cuttings around of toys they want for Christmas? Was this why she was always talking to me about you? Telling me what you liked and disliked. 

Maybe it wasn’t so crazy. While I’d not had a relationship since her mother, I had allowed myself to be talked into being set up a couple of times, usually by my feckless brother with one of his skeezy friends. All male, I now remembered. We’d never discussed this sort of thing but she was a smart kid. Maybe I should have. They say you’ve got to be honest with children, present the world to them as it is and allow them to make up their own minds about it. To be honest, conversations about Papa’s jumbled up excuse for a sexuality hadn't figured high in my priorities. It was partly procrastination and partly a worry that she wouldn’t understand. I mean, I didn’t really understand, so asking her to would be unreasonable. And I didn’t want her to feel like my relationship with her mother had been anything less than the profound, perfect thing that it was. I was going to love and miss Ella for the rest of my life. I was probably never going to love another woman.

I felt suddenly sorry for her. If this was what she was pinning her hopes on, she was certain to be disappointed. Obviously as a child she couldn’t be expected to understand how these things actually worked. That handsome, young P.E. teachers generally have their own lives. That even if they didn’t, it was highly unlikely that reclusive, doughy academics would be their type. That even if they were, he certainly wasn’t my type. What would we talk about? Football? Protein powder? Poor kid, I thought, looking back at the drawing. The three of us were in the centre of the page, looking like a happy family. Poor kid.

I felt a pressure on my back, a jolt in my stomach and for a moment I could visualise it perfectly. Your arms firm beneath me, your body warm against mine, your face inches away, my hand on the nape of your neck. I stuffed the picture in a drawer. This was madness. I was in such a state of guilty nervous tension for the rest of the evening that I burned the chicken nuggets. Steffi turned her nose up at them and helped herself to carrots from the fridge. There you were again. Breaking into my house. Into my life. Tomorrow I would have to talk to you when I picked Steffi up from dance practice. Maybe then I could lay out some ground rules, put you in your place, and show Steffi that whatever ideas she had about her teacher and me, they couldn’t be further from the mark.

For a moment I wished you’d never come here. I wished you’d just go away forever.


	5. Yoga Pants

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Thanks so much for your lovely comments! It really means a lot to me.

My stupid brother called me once on my 22nd birthday from a roadside services somewhere in northern Europe. He’d wanted to wish me a happy 21st. The rest of our conversation escapes me but something he said has always stuck with me. He said “Sometimes, the only way to get what you want is to steal the president’s car, put on a disguise and poison a whole town.”

I understand that doesn’t sound like great advice. And it’s not. He’d also reversed the charges on the call, so receiving this terrible advice had cost me actual money. But I kept coming back to it around the time we first met. 

What do you want, Rob? Is it worth the risk? What are you prepared to do to get it? Are you prepared to live with yourself if you manage to get it? How about if you don’t?

Now my brother, as you know, is not an introspective man, and I’m certain no such doubts ever occur to him. I was foolish enough to make him best man at my wedding to Ella. As well as laughing more or less all the way through the ceremony, he presented us with a lampshade he’d stolen from the hotel as a wedding gift and rounded off his frankly hair-raising speech by insisting all the guests join him in chanting “Ricky is the best. Ricky is the best.”

But it was these questions I was asking myself as the weeks passed and my feelings surrounding you flipped around almost as much as you did in the average hour. Friday would arrive, the day of Steffi’s dance practice, and I knew I’d have to see you. I’d be nervous and tetchy all day. More so than usual. God help the student who interrupted me in a Friday lecture to question the validity of postcolonial theory. God help the insecure 1st year who wanted to tell me their life story during office hours. God even help the well-meaning colleague who complimented me on my tie.

It was 3pm and I was in the toilets on campus, staring at my own face. I’d removed the tie, Stupid idea. But now the collar of my shirt gaped open like a rusty gate, and the sight of my own neck was making me uneasy. This was the other side wasn’t it? What came after the euphoria of rediscovering a love of aesthetics; once you start to care about how you look, you don’t get to just stop. And today I felt like an overdressed mannequin. I knew why. It was a Friday. Nothing ever felt right on a Friday since you came into the picture.

Every week I’d show up, grumpy and sour, determined that this would be the week I’d let you have a piece of my mind. For what transgression? I don’t know. But I’d arrive, furious at you for your smiles, and your energy and your… muscles, and I’d stomp through the school corridors muttering curses. I’d reach the gym and slip inside -I’d taken to arriving 10 minutes early- to watch the final moments of your class. I’d then probably spend the whole time making faces at Steffi to distract her, feeling triumph when I could elicit a laugh from her, and divert her attention from you for just a moment.

The class would end. Steffi would go to change her shoes and grab her stuff, and without fail you would bound up to me, smiling that smile.

“Hi, Robbie!”

Ugh… I knew you had a fanclub of mothers who did the same thing I did; turned up early to pick up their children from class. Sometimes they’d grab you by the bicep and talk to you about parent-teacher evenings, community BBQs and little Junior’s progress (There was certainly at least one child in that class who did NOT think aerobics was a cool sport, and probably wouldn’t be there if Mama wasn’t quite so keen on running into you once a week.) And you’d chat to them, you’d nod and smile, and agree with their various opinions on yoga. You had plenty of inane conversations about quinoa coming your way, so I didn’t understand why you would always insist on approaching me anyway. I’d stand at the back of the room, lurking, half terrified that you’d turn around and your blue eyes would fix on me, and half terrified that you wouldn’t.

Prickly and panicky I would correct you once again. Rob, I’d say, I actually go by Rob. And you’d cock your head to the side, as though you didn’t quite believe me. Okay, you’d say.

The only thing that would save us from the awkward half-conversation that inevitably followed would be Steffi’s return. Her voice higher and louder than it ever was at home; saturated with excitement and confidence. She’d stand between us, looking from one to the other and recount some story or other about how Trixie had gotten stuck in a tree trying to get the perfect angle to swipe Principal Meanswell’s toupee, and you’d had to climb up there and help her down. I knew of this Trixie only through her namesake in Steffi’s stories, and what I knew about her did not make me keen to meet this clearly awful little girl. The two of you would chat as we walked back to my car, twittering like birds while I stalked alongside in sullen silence.

I had no reason to assume, as I parked up outside the school that Friday, that this particular day would be any different.

I was surprised then to find that when I poked my head around the door of the gym you weren’t there. Instead, a bored-looking teacher’s assistant picked her fingernails while the kids worked on what must have been their own routines. Steffi was in steel-door mode, eyes straight-ahead as she leaned forward, crutches engaged with the floor at a sharp angle, attempting to stretch her leg far behind her. Watching her, I felt my throat tighten, but had become so familiar with this feeling that little more than a deep breath dispersed the worst of it.

There were voices coming from around the corner. Instead of entering the gym I closed the door and listened. One of the voices I didn’t know, but the other was unmistakably you.

“... I think that’s great! If it makes you want to get involved with your daughter’s dancing...” That was you alright, even one-on-one you seemed to be shouting. 

I crept a little closer. Just round the corner from the gym there was a bank of lockers. They were short, because kids are short, but if I crouched against the wall beside them I could just about see what was going on. I could see the number 10 on your back. You were stood in the corridor talking with someone. The angle didn’t allow me to see her face, not that I think I would have known her, but she was short and wearing yoga pants. She was stood very close to you, her weight on one hip. As I watched she raised a slender hand which toyed with the zip on the front of your tracksuit.

“I’m glad to hear that.” She purred. You chuckled. I wasn’t sure what I was witnessing. I’d heard you chuckle before but not like that. “Because I think you should come over to my house later tonight.” The hand on the zip strayed downwards and you laughed that laugh again. A limper sound than I’d heard you make in our entire acquaintance.

“Tonight?” You replied, finally finding your indoors voice. I pressed harder against the cold side of the lockers, wanting to hear but not wanting to hear.

“Well, my husband’s out of town right now…” There was a silence. “And Trixie will be in bed by 8.” She was pressed right up against you now, I could see her other hand snake around your upper arm. I couldn’t see your face but I could see your shoulders, they visibly tensed as her fingers tightened.

“Do you need help with something?” You asked, an edge in your voice now that betrayed something utterly unfamiliar. It was almost like fear. She laughed now, the hand moving from your upper arm to the nape of your neck, to the short blond waves I’d caught myself admiring in unguarded moments. My face was warm enough to heat the whole locker bank, but there was a uncomfortably cool feeling in my chest.

“You could say that.” She murmured, as she pushed herself onto her toes, and her face towards yours. 

I closed my eyes. For a moment I couldn’t even bring to mind where I was or what I was doing. There was a humming in my ears like a cloud of fruit flies. A green and grey fog was crowding my mind. Stupid man. It was all I could think. Stupid man. What do you want, Rob? Answer me, stupid. What do you want, you pathetic little man? Admit it to yourself. You might as well admit it now. The voice in my head sounded like my brother. I remembered what he said when I told him I was marrying Ella. ‘Someone’s marrying you? Is she crazy?’ The mist stung behind my eyes. Yes, alright. I wanted you. I opened my eyes.

There had been a sound. A squeak of sports-shoe against hallway floor. As I faded back into the room, you were talking very fast.

“It’s not that I don’t like you… I do like you very much, I think you’re a very nice person, but I don’t think… I don’t want...” You had backed up a good few steps. Your hands were up by your shoulders, as though you were being arrested. I could see the short woman’s face now, and it wore a look of rage and hurt.

“Are you serious?” She scoffed. You didn’t have an answer to that. “Christ. Fuck you, then.” She muttered, and started back up the corridor. Right in my direction. I thought she was going to spot me but she didn’t seem to. She walked right by and threw open the door to the gym. The sound of bland Europop pumped through the corridor for just a moment before it thudded shut after her.

I couldn’t see you anymore. You had moved out of my sight-line. But in the silence that followed I heard you draw a ragged breath.

I waited for you to get and up and go back to the gym. It was nearly time for the class to be over. Then I thought I could grab Steffi and get out of here, outrunning my ill-gotten epiphany until I got back to my study; a dark cave that I craved at that moment. But you didn’t go. I sat there and listened to you breathe. Now in strong, measured puffs. The breaths of a person who was concentrating on breathing. 

As quietly as I could, I got to my feet. You didn’t look up. I took a step, and then another, coming out from the side of the lockers until I was right in the middle of the corridor. I could see you now. You were sat on the floor, against the front of the locker bank. You had your eyes screwed tightly shut, and the thumb and forefinger on your right hand gripped the bridge of your nose.

“Hello?” I said. You inhaled sharply. Your eyes flickered open, and then to me. You exhaled. And then you smiled.

“Hi Robbie. I’m sorry. Rob.” You corrected, shaking your head. “Are you okay?”

You looked shaken. Somehow childlike. I had never imagined you could look like this. I thought vulnerability was for losers like me, not strong, beautiful people.

“Robbie is okay.” I replied, sitting down against the opposite wall of the corridor. “Actually my brother calls me Robbie. So did my parents.” You were looking at me. You looked confused. “I actually wanted to ask if you… were okay.”

“Yes, I’m fine.” Your smile wavered, your eyes dropped to the floor. I was charmed even then by what an inept liar you were. “Robbie, can I ask you something?” Your eyes remained down.

“Sure.”

“Did I do something to upset you?”

I blinked.

“What?” You looked back at me. I couldn’t suss out your expression. This look passed between us for a long time. 

You were waiting for me to answer. You honestly wanted to know.

“No.” I was astounded. “Of course not.” I wondered how on earth you could have thought that. I wondered why you cared. “No, you’ve never done anything to upset me. I’m just...” But how to account for my terrible behaviour? For my huffing and puffing and glowering? “... not great with people.”

You smiled then. Your shoulders lowered. You smiled properly, like yourself, and I tingled from head to toe.

“I don’t think that’s true.” You said. And you meant it. I knew you meant it because I’d seen you try to lie. What were you? How could a creature like you even exist in the world? “I think you are very kind.”

Now I laughed. What an absurd accusation! I don’t think you knew why I was laughing, but you laughed too. You seemed happy that I seemed happy.

“Well, thank you.” I replied, still chuckling. “I’m sorry, what is your name? Steffi won’t tell me what your actual name is, and I can’t just call you Sportacus.”

“My name is-”

There was a shout from the gym. 

Not a childish, playful shout. No. It was the sort of shout you never really think about until you become a parent. A shout you’re always primed for, always dreading. This was a shout of real, genuine emergency.

My blood curdled.

It was Steffi.


	6. Hairpins

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> You might have noticed what started off as something very small and silly has slightly gotten away from me now. I wasn't sure about putting this one up. It gets a little dark. I'm gonna put a little additional content warning here for visualised depictions of mental crisis. It might not be everyone's cup of tea.

I’m not sure how to do this next bit. 

You know, when Steffi was a tiny baby, I didn’t have any of that mad terror new parents often describe. In fact it was quite the opposite, I’d never felt so calm. I’d spent my whole life up to that point bullshitting my way from one stupid situation to another. The various silly business-plans I’d cooked up, half-formed inventions, and then my absurd PhD. I spent most of my time in a state of manic tension, certain that I would be discovered as a fraud at any second.

Contrary to the common experience, after Steffi was born I started getting MORE sleep. Ella struggled with the newborn’s schedule, but for me waking up five times a night to pace around a small room muttering nonsense-words was very familiar territory. The addition of a baby in my arms was nothing but welcome. I used to take her down to the great big chair, the one that I still keep in the living room, and we’d fall asleep in it together. Ella would gently kick my shin to wake me as grey dawn-light crept through the curtains, with hairpins in her mouth as she tamed her thick, black hair.

I’d never thought anything could be so solid, so robust and eternal as our little family. Back then I never worried that Steffi would fall down the stairs, or jam her fingers in a plug socket, or just die in her sleep the way I’m told babies sometimes do. We were indestructible, and I was certain of it.

I’m stalling. 

Technically you already know what happens next. But you do, and you don’t.

These memories are like a whirlpool to me now. It’s hard for me to see the middle without getting caught in the current and slipping right back in. And if I wade back in, I know how it’ll feel, and I know it won’t end until that sickening jolt, like the end of a falling dream when you wake up with your stomach somewhere around your ears.

I’m still stalling.

The moment before I entered the gym, that fraction of a second, I visualised that there wouldn’t be a floor on the other side, nor walls, and that I would step out into an emptiness so unending that I wouldn’t be able to tell I was falling were it not for the panic constricting my chest.The teaching assistant was with her when I entered the gym. Something about the angle at which Steffi lay, her crutches splayed where they fell like the legs of a dying insect, revolted me.

The images come in flashes really as though viewed through a zoetrope, Steffi’s panicked whistle cry puncturing each frame.

I’m holding her head on my lap. someone has covered her lower half in a coat. I’m stroking her hair. I look at the angle of her shoulder and I wonder if I’m going to throw up.

There are paramedics. They ask her questions about her name, her age, which she answers in short syllables between gasped breaths. The gas they give her makes her light-headed. She can’t remember her birthday. I tell them. They ask me questions about her disability before they move her into the chair. I wish my paramedic were here.

They move her gently into the ambulance. I’m told it’s a shoulder dislocation. It will need reduction. I don’t know what that means. Ella would have known. 

I feel a hand on my shoulder.

“She’ll be okay, Robbie.”

What shifts in me then is not something usually operational in daylight. Something that makes it’s home in the pit of my stomach, born from a swamp of oily black dread, fed on six years of fetid fears. It opens a red eye.

“How dare you.” It growls “This is your fault.”

You say nothing.

“I knew this would happen. You arrogant bully. Don’t you dare go near her ever again. Do you hear me? Not EVER again!”

I don’t recall what your face looked like then. Nor do I really recall the journey. I recall the reduction procedure though. She bore it with great bravery. I, on the other hand, fell apart.

Home from the hospital, Steffi sank into a pain-medicated sleep. 

What did you want, Rob? The black thing whispered in the dead hour of night. What did it cost you? And I didn’t sleep. For the following week I just didn’t sleep.

Bessie came back. I don’t remember reaching out to her. Maybe I didn’t, maybe she just had a sixth sense for the tremors in my emotional landscape, because she seemed to live now in my kitchen, the smell of bread and cinnamon marking her territory.

I’m not blaming her. Without her help, who knows what might have happened. But with her on hand meeting Steffi’s every need, and me too riven with guilt to even look my daughter in the eye, it made slipping back into that tarmac all too easy. I lived for a while in a grey state between deep night and early morning. The black thing took the shape of my brother, and he lounged against the back of my chair, picking at his nails with a switchblade.

“Well, you won’t be doing that again, will you?”

I blinked, bleary, aching.

“What would Ella say? Knowing you put a silly little crush before the safety of her child. I know you’re a romantic, kid, but this is ridiculous. What if they’re wrong? What if she can never use that arm again? Won’t that be something, a one-armed girl to go along with everything else. And she’ll have you to thank for it. See if she wants to be a dancer then, Casanova.”

He flicked something at me. I flinched. He laughed, his laugh was higher pitched than I expected. I turned to him and saw instead the woman in the yoga pants. She had crocodile eyes. She sunk over the arm of the chair until she lay across me. Her lips were a gaping maw.

“You should know by now where it gets you. Poor, greedy man. What made you think you deserved someone else? What makes you think you deserve what you have? Especially when it’s so fragile. And it is fragile, Robbie. You could have lost her. If she’d fallen on her head instead of her shoulder that might have been it. Then you’d really be alone. Maybe that’s what you deserve.”

I closed my eyes, but I could still see it. It slithered off me and across the living room floor where it reformed in front of the window. The yellow streetlights glimmered round its silhouette.

“This isn’t good.” It was now my young paramedic. He was referring to a screen on his wristwatch. It illuminated his dark skin with a greenish light. “According to this, it’s definitely a safeguarding issue now. I said get her a stair-lift, not let her do acrobatics. You’re supposed to be her father. Her guardian. Where were you? You know she’d be better off with someone else. Anyone else. It’s selfish to keep her in these substandard conditions.”

It lifted it’s bruise-red, reptilian eyes to me and suddenly it was right up against me, nose-to-nose. It looked like my brother, it looked like the woman, like the paramedic, like Bessie, like the Principal, it even looked like you. It didn’t have to talk because I knew what it was saying. And I knew it was right. Fraud. Failure. Lazy. Pathetic. Greedy. Sugarpie.

Sugarpie?

There was a pain in my shin. The noise had ceased. I opened heavy eyes to the cold grey of early dawn.

“Come on Sugarpie, you’ve gotta wake up now.” She whispered, turning back towards the window, her words stifled by the hairpins in her teeth. She combed her fingers through wide black waves of hair. She divided it into two sections and tied each in a low bun on either side of her head, affixing them with two hairpins each. I had watched her do it a million times. She turned back to me.

“Ella.”

She put a finger to her lips. I looked down to see the baby in my arms. Tiny Steffi, fast asleep.

“I’m sorry, Ella.” I whispered. “I’ve messed it all up.” She cocked her head at me quizzically and knelt down, placing a finger on the baby’s cheek. I watched my wife as she did so. I watched her moving and breathing, with pink in her cheeks and sleep-dust in her eyes.

“Nonsense. She’s fine.” She said. “Let me?” Without waiting for a response she took little Steffi into her arms. The baby stirred but didn’t wake. “Shhhhh” she soothed. Then she looked back at me. “Your Steffi’s fine, too.”

“But she got hurt.” Ella glared at me so I lowered my voice. “I let her get hurt. It’s because I…” I couldn’t say it. I didn’t have to say it.

She rolled her eyes.

“You’re so dramatic, Rob. You remember I dislocated my shoulder doing Sleeping Beauty? It hurt, but it got better, and I danced again. She’s probably got my joints. Dancers have terrible joints, you know, but we make up for it being flexible.” She raised her eyebrows. “Does that make it my fault?”

“No.”

“Of course it doesn’t.” She nodded once, to show that was the end of the matter. “So what are you gonna do, Sugarpie? Sit here listening to that asshole brother of yours, or help Steffi recover so she can get back to what she loves?”

“But what if she gets hurt again?”

“She will.” Ella shrugged. “So what? Dancing is painful, you’ve seen my feet.” She reached a hand out and touched mine. Her hands were cold. They always used to be cold. “You have to be able to deal with this, Rob.” Her fingernails were painted purple.

“I know.” I said, squeezing my eyes tight shut. I felt like my chest might burst open. Like a million moths would cascade from inside me. I didn’t want her to let go.

“And call that P.E teacher. I think you owe him an apology.”

“What?”

I opened my eyes to the empty living room. It was daylight. Not the soft grey of dawn but the golden yellow of a spring morning. I looked down at my palm where I could still feel the cool pressure of her hand. There was nothing there.

Steffi’s voice rang out through the house.

“Papa!”

“Yes?” I called out, leaping to my feet.

“Can I have a glass of water?” I exhaled. My heart felt swollen, strange, like it had done some serious heavy lifting overnight. But some of the fire in my brain had burnt itself out. As I filled a glass with water from the kitchen, I spotted a plate of cinnamon buns in the middle of the worktop with a little note on it.

“Remember to take care of yourself. - B”

I took one up to Steffi with her water, but she complained that you shouldn’t eat sweets so early in the morning and dispatched me to find her some fruit. 

Within another two weeks she was hobbling around on one crutch, refusing to stay in bed. By week four she was demanding to go back to school. On week five I let her, under strict instructions from doctor, physio and myself that she take it easy.

After I’d done the school run I walked up to my study and sat there for nearly 40 minutes, staring at the post-it note in my hand. I was surprised that Steffi’s teacher knew who I was asking about immediately when I waved my arms around and made whooshing sound effects. I was more surprised when she agreed to give me your home telephone number.

I had it on this note here, but I hadn’t called yet. I was trying to work out what to say.


	7. Snow Globes

As I searched for a parking space somewhere near your tower block, I considered the brief and strange phone conversation that had followed me finally plucking up the courage to call.

When you answered I was taken aback. You sounded hurried, possibly even stressed. And I still didn’t know what to say.

“Hello… is this… Sport-”

“Robbie?”

My heart did a funny little flip. I realised it had been nearly six weeks since I’d heard you say my name. The anger towards you had dissipated as quickly as it arrived, and up until that moment I hadn’t consciously realised how much I wanted to hear the sound of your voice.

“Yes, I’m just ringing be-”

“Are you still there?”

“Y-yes, I’m here. I need to-”

“Hello? I think the line is very bad!”

“Sportacus, I need to apologi-”

“Robbie, I can’t hear you. And I’ve gotta go. I’ll be back at 7 if you would like to come to my place.”

You told me the address, and then you hung up. I wondered what was pulling you so urgently out the door. I wondered whether it was hurry in your voice or irritation. It had never occurred to me that you might be a person who did anything besides teaching P.E. I couldn’t imagine you out of a tracksuit. Between my call at 5pm and the invitation at 7, I had two hours in which to agonise about whether I really wanted to go to your house. I was, honestly, very worried about what I might learn there.

Aware as I was at this point that I had the mother of all crushes on you, I was now placed in the position of having to decide what exactly that meant. Was I prepared to see you in a context other than the one I’d grown accustomed to? I hungered to know more about you, just as I dreaded it.

Regardless, I still owed you that apology, so I got Bessie to come and watch Steffi and I went to see you. When Bessie asked where I was going, I said I was going to a late-opening garden centre to look at pot plants. My respect for her increased when I got the feeling that she didn’t believe me.

I parked a street away and approached Zeppelin Tower. I gazed up at the white-clad structure. It was one of the new developments they’d built in the centre of town, part of a revitalisation initiative that I thought was making the whole city look like it had been built from Ikea flat-pack furniture. Of course you lived here. It couldn’t have been further from my crumbling late Victorian home with poor insulation and terrible 1960s refurbishments. When we bought it, Ella and I had every intention of ripping out the fake fireplaces and scraping off the pebble-dashing to reveal what we were sure would be a very charming property, but I think you know where that plan went.

I took the elevator to the top floor. When I got to your door, I had a minor panic. I checked my watch. It was 6:58. Was I too early? Would I seem oddly keen? Should I have brought something? Like what, Rob, flowers? No. Let’s just get this over with. You probably didn’t want to see me anyway, last time we spoke I called you an arrogant bully, and that wasn’t very nice. I was just there to make sure that you were happy to continue giving Steffi lessons, and that was that.

I waited until 7:01 to knock on the door.

When it opened, all my words deserted me. I’m not sure what I had expected, but it wasn’t this. A ripple of unease flowed into my face and down to my fingertips. Did I have the wrong house?

The woman who answered the door looked to be in her 60s. Her hair was in rollers and an unlit cigarette was hanging from the corner of her mouth. She was small, and dressed in the most horrid green and orange housecoat I had ever seen. We blinked at each other for a few seconds.

“I’m sorry.” I started. “Does… Somebody else live here?”

“Are you look for Íþro?” The word meant nothing to me. This must have shown in my face because she shook her head and started to close the door.

“Yes!” I burst out. “At least, I think I am. My name is Rob. I’m here to see… him.” She regarded me closely, and her beady blue eyes searched me from the ground up. I shuffled uncomfortably. I’d been getting dressed daily as a matter of course lately rather than languishing in my dressing gown, but today was not a work day and off the back of Steffi’s convalescence I perhaps wasn’t looking my best

Whatever conclusion she came to, it worked in my favour. She shrugged and stepped aside, welcoming me in.

“Do you smoke cigarette?” She asked as I passed.

“Oh, no thank you.” I replied. She closed the door and crossed the little apartment to a kitchenette, where she lit the one dangling from her mouth off the stove. I stood in the doorway and took it in, trying to puzzle out what was going on here.

The flat was clearly modern. White-walled with pale wood floors. All the furniture was white, probably flat-packed, and functional to a fault. The living area was not large, containing a small dining table with two fold-out chairs, and a sofa which was, I noticed, not facing a television. There didn’t appear to even be a television! It wasn’t messy, but counter to the stark functionality of the furniture, the decor seemed to be in something of an argument with itself. Broad, blank space was broken up by kitschy nic-nacs. Porcelain animals, a figurine of a little boy fishing. There was more than one snow globe containing the Icelandic flag.

On the other hand there were things about this room that made me think of you. There was a small rack of free weights in the corner, and folded up against the wall next to the dining table there was some bulky piece of exercise equipment, over which it looked as though this woman had decided to hang her laundry. More than this, however, it was the photos which confirmed that you did undoubtedly live here.

They were everywhere. On every wall, on every surface, in little frames of every colour. They all contained some combination of the same three people. A woman, a man and a boy. 

I stopped and looked at a large framed picture hanging just next to the door. This one was of a father and son. The father had a stern, almost military aspect to him and a well-groomed moustache and beard. And he was standing with you. You can’t have been older than 15 in that picture, squinting into a cold sun with your papa’s hand on your shoulder. The two of you were smiling, standing on the deck of a small boat, looking windswept and cheerily exhausted.

I’ve told you this once before and you threw an apple at my head, but your dad was a handsome guy. In as much as he looked a lot like you. And yet at the same time, he looked very different. What I mean is, I think he saw very differently. From every wall of your small apartment his eyes could be found, scrutinising, investigating. He smiled in every picture but there was a fixed hardness in his jaw, and a chill in his gaze that made him seem entirely alien from you.

“That is Íþro Pabbi.” Your mother said, from her place by the stove. She had placed a very old looking kettle on the hob now. “Do you like coffee?” I nodded. She seemed pleased. She gestured to the sofa and I gingerly took a seat. “He was also name Íþro. It is family name. For 10 sons.” I nodded. I wondered how she felt about her son’s ancestral name being usurped in his workplace by 'Sportacus'. I wondered if she knew. I decided I wasn’t going to mention it.

I was surprised that you lived with your mother. I would never have guessed it. That’s not a disparagement, by the way. I suppose I’d been more worried that when I came to your house I’d meet your wife. This was awkward, certainly, but not a disaster.

“When is… your son expected home?” I asked, deciding not to risk mispronouncing your name as she handed me a cup of very black coffee. She took a seat on the other side of the sofa and lifted her shoulders in another shrug. “He said I should meet him here for 7.”

“He is teach at community centre on Monday. He will come home soon.” I nodded. The coffee was bitter. When I said I liked coffee, I meant I liked milk and sugar with a slight undertaste of coffee, but I was too ashamed to admit this and so soldiered through my cup of tar. “Íþro has said you are come. He talk of you some of time. Robbie.”

I was surprised.

“Yes. Robbie is fine too. I umm… I suppose we’re friends. Well, more acquaintances really. I have a daughter at the school he teaches at and he’s been giving her dancing lessons. Only she got hurt. It wasn’t his fault! God, no, I’m not saying anything like that. In fact that’s why I’m here. I was something of an idiot. Well… I am something of an idiot, but I behaved like more of one than usual.”

She nodded at me. She was either agreeing that I was an idiot, or she didn’t really understand and was being polite. I laughed, a quick, nervous bark of a laugh and sipped again at this hell-drink while inhaling her cigarette smoke.

“What’s… Your name?” I asked her, grasping around for a way to divert this conversation from me.

“I am Solla.” She said, with a gracious smile. “And I am very please to meet you, Robbie.”

There was the sound of a key turning in the lock, and both of us sat upright with a start, looking towards the front door. When you came through, toting a large bag of sports equipment over your shoulder, and turned and saw the two of on the sofa, the look on your face was of a man who upon looking in the cupboard for tea bags, had instead found a parallel dimension in which teabags were not only sentient, but ruled over humanity with an iron fist. 

I don’t know what you’d been expecting. 

Your mother went straight over to you, talking in rapid Icelandic. You, wary, responded as you put your bag down and took off your jacket. I watched as you waved your hand in front of your face and then gestured at me. I think you were admonishing your mother for smoking in front of guests. I thought that was very sweet.

It gave me a moment to take you in, anyway. Either in the six weeks since I’d seen you last, you had somehow become more lovely, or I was just more willing to admit it to myself now. Your sandy blonde hair was tousled from the breeze, and the sleeveless top you were wearing under your jacket revealed a light dusting of freckles across your shoulders.

You finally turned to me.

“Hi Robbie.” You seemed almost sheepish. I don’t think this was how you’d planned for this evening to go. “Are you… okay?” You asked, in that way you always do. I nodded. The three of us stood in this room, looking from each other to the floor. You made eye contact with your mother, or she did with you, and a small silent struggle seemed to take place.

“Okay!” She said, re-wrapping her housecoat around herself and shaking her head. She went to the kitchen, poured herself another cup of coffee and walked out of the room, closing the door to the adjoining room rather heavily behind.

The silence stretched between us. I could tell something about being here was affecting you. I didn’t know why you’d invited me to this space that you shared with your mother and a million photographs of your father. I said the only thing I could think of.

“Do you want to go for a walk?”

You know I’m not a person who will generally voluntarily walk anywhere, so I hope you were grateful. You seemed grateful.

We left the tower block and walked once round a nearby park more or less in silence. It was almost fully dark by the time we stopped near the small duck pond. It was empty of ducks, and a chill had been lingering in the air since March that had yet to dissipate now we were well into April. I shivered and put my hands in my pockets, and I thought about how it was likely much colder where you came from.

“Ithro, I wanted to say-”

You laughed. You were laughing and I didn’t know why. Had my pronunciation been that bad? I flushed.

“You don’t have to call me that.” You said. When I met your eye, your expression was kinder than I’d feared. But I was frustrated. I thought I’d cracked the code.

“Your mother said it was your name.”

“It is.”

God damn this riddle.

“So what should I call you, if not your name?” I asked, getting exasperated. “Sportaflop?”

“I actually prefer the nickname. Íþro is my father’s name. It’s quite a lot. Sportacus feels more like me.”

I thought again about your father’s powerful build, his stern gaze, his set jaw. I wondered if he was dead, or if he just wasn’t here. That flat certainly wasn’t big enough for three people. It wasn’t really big enough for two. I wondered why you’d moved away from Iceland. And I wondered why your mother had come with you.

“Anyway.” I started. “I need to apologise.”

And I did. You listened while I tried to explain myself. I didn’t tell you everything, but I told you the things I was able to articulate. That I didn’t mean it when I told you to stay away forever, that I was just scared. I should have, but I didn’t tell you about the other things. I didn’t tell you about Ella, or my brother’s voice, or the dangerous black thing that lived in the fouler parts of me. I suppose at that point we were barely friends. I was also enamoured by the fact that in spite of my consistently horrible behaviour, you seemed to like me, and I was hesitant to do anything that would jeopardise that. Even if ‘anything’ meant letting you in on the truth about what I was really like.

When I was done you looked at me with this silly half smile, and told me that you understood, and that you hadn’t been angry. That if you hadn’t wanted to give me and Steffi some space after the accident, you would have got in touch.

Then there was a moment in which you looked like you wanted to say something else. I waited for you, a slight buzz ringing behind my eyes. This thing that you wanted to say didn’t exist yet, but it seemed important. Maybe I was projecting, but the evening air shifted differently for that moment, as though a charge had silently passed through the atmosphere.

And then it was gone. You walked with me back to my car and told me you hoped your mother hadn’t burned the flat down by the time you got back. That was when I realised I’d been gone for over two hours, and Bessie would never believe I’d been out looking at plants.

I drove home, mulling over the things I had learned that evening. I stopped into a petrol station and bought a bunch of flowers for Bessie. I felt like some kind of line had been crossed and it made me uneasy. Why had you invited me to your house when it had clearly made you so uncomfortable? What were you trying to show me? It was all a bit of a mystery and I had to conclude that you’d just had a lapse of judgement.

Maybe I was mad. Deluded. Lonely. 

Or maybe it had been more than your flat you were trying to invite me into.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> It's a bit of an in-betweeny one. Already working on next chapter!


	8. Secret Weapon

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Two in one day. We must be nearing the end.
> 
> I just want to say thank you again to everybody who's left comments. I'm a playwright in real life, who's been deep in a slump since the summer, and hearing you say such wonderful things means a great deal to me. I can't articulate how much.
> 
> Also, if you want to see some cool ass dancing with forearm crutches, I've been watching this guy: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7aEnQz31IL8

Looking back on it now, it’s strange to think how much time was passing. In a way it all feels like it happened in the blink of an eye, in some crazy whirlwind. But really it’s a matter of perspective. For me, I’d been living in a temporal haze for a very long time. There was no peace, but there were also few ups and few downs. It’s how everything managed to degrade as far as it had, but also probably why I hadn’t gone and done something REALLY stupid before that point. 

I believe in bereavement there is a phase you have to make it through when you honestly have no conception of what the future could look like. It’s like when you take a wrong turn using a Satellite Navigation system and the screen goes completely blank while it calibrates a new route for you. 

Except that blank screen can last years.

Memories aren’t just memories, either. Memories begin long before they actually happen. There’s planning, speculation, and then there’s visualising her face when she sees that present you might get her next month, or who she’ll flirt with when she goes with you to your school reunion. I have memories of whole conversations with Ella that we were going to have in the future. I can remember how her face was going to look, trying not to cry at Steffi’s graduation. Memory is alive. And I had approximately 60 years worth of these speculative memories with Ella that had suddenly been rendered invalid.

The speeding up of time, then, was something of a hallmark of healing for me. Not that I had any awareness of it. Because once you are able to visualise time stretching ahead of you again, each passing moment is no longer a slow, grinding, hateful slog into the next one.

To this end, Steffi’s long-anticipated dance recital was suddenly upon us, and I still had so much to do. Which was why at 7:45 the night before, I was still pinning the hem of Steffi’s dress while she fidgeted in front of the mirror.

We’d worked on it together over the last three months. Steffi had drawn me some designs; some of them lifted straight from the pages of her Lazytown stories, and I’d started working out how I would be able to transform them into an actual dress. We decided on pink, more pink and white. Kneeling next to her, I was aware of her watching herself, checking the garment over and over. I knew she was nervous.

“Papa…” She said quietly.

I had pins in my mouth and so could only respond with a grunt.

“What if I haven’t practised enough?” She picked gently at one of the bows on her bodice. Her eyes moved to the wall where her crutches were leaning. We had spent some of the afternoon adorning them with glittery pink tape and lacy bows to match the dress. “What if I don’t do very good?” 

She crossed her arm over her chest and touched her shoulder. It was long healed now and as strong as it had ever been, but I noticed in odd moments that she would touch it when she was feeling unsure.

“Will people laugh at me?”

I took the pins from my mouth and sat back on my heels.

“Puppy, where has this come from?” I asked. She shrugged. I wasn’t sure what to say. Her fears were my fears, and normally I counted on her to dismiss them. “You’re a great dancer.”

I went back to the pinning. I know that sounds cold, but I was very aware of the time, and I had to get this finished before Steffi’s bedtime just after 8. I still had a couple of batches of brownies to make that night as well because I had gotten a bit competitive at parent/teacher night last week and insisted that I made the best brownies any of them had ever tasted. Oh Rob, that’s great, then you can volunteer to bring snacks to the dance recital next week! I saw you trying to hide your laughter across the room, and it just made me more determined that I was going to blow all of their minds. The problem was that it wasn’t technically my recipe, it was Bessie’s, and she was away this weekend with some mystery suitor she’d refused to tell me anything about. The old minx.

“Maybe I shouldn’t dance tomorrow.” She murmured. Her tone sent a soft chill through me. I turned her round to face me. Her wide brown eyes looked like Ella’s, but the furtive worry in them now was all me. I’d never been aware of us resembling each other much at all before.

“Hey.” I said. “What would Sportacus say?” She looked down and hunched her shoulders. “He would say that it doesn’t matter what happens tomorrow. What matters is that you always try your best. Because no matter what happens, I’m proud of you, Sportacus is proud of you, Mama is proud of you, and YOU are going to be proud of you. Aren’t you?”

She looked at me quizzically. The truth is I didn’t know what you would have said. How you would have fixed this. I didn’t have your stone-cold conviction.

“If you don’t want to perform, of course you don’t have to. But don’t you think it’ll be exciting to show everyone you routine?” She thought about this for a moment, and then she nodded. “And you’ve been working so hard, it’d be a shame not to dance, right?” She nodded again. I took her small hand and cupped it between mine. “And you’re going to beat the living hell out of all those other kids, right?” I added in a whisper. She grinned now.

“Yeah!”

“Yeah? And you’ll be the best dressed, once we've added the secret weapon!”

“Yeah!”

“Yeah! Now it’s time for you to go to bed.”

Let me tell you, after such a St. Crispin's day speech as that, she did not want to go to bed. I made a mental parenting note in future to save invigorating pep-talks for mornings. Then I slouched downstairs to get making these brownies, planning to hand-sew the hemline on the dress while they were in the oven and maybe watch some Don’t Tell the Bride.

I woke up to the sound of an angry woman telling her fiance she didn’t want to get married in fuschia, and it took me a moment to register the smell of smoke. I don’t want to go into it, but I spent the next 30 minutes opening every window in the house and wafting the smoke out using a baking tray. I also wrote a real physical note to myself to check the battery in the smoke detector.

When we arrived at the school the next day, I sent Steffi off to do some final rehearsal while I unpacked my shameful bag of store bought brownies.

“Oh my! Those can’t be homemade.” 

I had just laid them all out on the trays when I heard the high pitched exclamation behind me. I quickly stuffed the packaging under the table and spun around. It was the short woman in the yoga pants. But she wasn’t wearing yoga pants today. She was wearing a summery, candy-striped dress and I can only imagine one hell of a pushup bra.

“Rob, isn’t it? We met at the parent/teacher evening last week.”

“We did?”

“And your little Steffi is such good friends with my Trixie. Isn’t it so crazy that we’ve never really spoken before now?” She was smiling. There was a sort of relentless urgency in her voice that was putting my already jangling nerves right on edge.

“Yeah that’s…”

“I think it is so brave of you to encourage Steffi to try things like this. I’m always telling Trixie how proud I am of her for making Steffi feel so included in everything. She’s a really community-spirited kid, you know I think she could run for office one day.” I think if a tiger shark could laugh, it would have laughed like this woman. A little point of red was dancing in front of my eyes now, hovering over her forehead like the sights on a rifle. Everything about this woman made me want to shoot her out of a cannon, launch her into a pit and crush her in a garbage disposal.

“I love your dress.” Is what I actually said, forcing my face into a smile “They say stripes can be very forgiving.” Her smile flickered for a moment. She picked up one of my brownies and I could see that the game was on.

“So… tell me Rob. How do you get the edges so precise on these? They almost look like they’ve come straight out of a packet.”

“I always keep a sharp knife on hand.” I responded belligerently. “What did you say your name was?”

“Halla.”

“Halla. Well. It’s been an absolute pleasure meeting you.” I was distracted at that moment because you entered the auditorium. You were fussing about with something on the stage. Halla followed my gaze to you as well.

“You too. We should definitely meet for coffee sometime.” Neither of us were paying each other the slightest bit of attention at this point. You looked up and spotted me across the room. You smiled and waved. My chest lifted.

“Definitely!” I responded airily, returning your wave bashfully. Halla was looking at me now, and there was something predatory in that look. It made the hairs on the back of my neck itch. When I turned back to the refreshment table she was gone. Awful creature. 

No, I thought, she was probably just bored. I thought about what I’d seen between you and her a couple of months previously, and felt something less like anxiety and more like pity. However, I still wasn’t crazy about what she’d said about Steffi and spent the next 10 minutes thinking up creative ways to sneak dog food into her handbag. Ah, if only. But I had more important things to do.

When Steffi was done with her last-minute rehearsal, I went backstage to help her with her dress. It was mainly mothers back there and I got some funny looks, particularly since in solidarity with Steffi I’d possibly gone a little bit overboard in the fancypants department and let her paint my nails bright pink. Backstage wasn’t exactly backstage anyway, it was just the school gym, and it was full of overexcited children twirling about. Steffi was pale and quiet as I helped her with her petticoat and laced up her bodice. I squeezed her arm. I was holding a coal-shaped lump of dread in my own throat, and didn’t want to talk too much in case she could detect it in my voice. I handed her crutches to her as the fifteen minute warning sounded over the tannoy. She turned to me with large, panicked eyes and I gave her a big hug. I looked around for you, but you were nowhere to be found.

“I'm so proud of you.” I croaked into her shoulder. “Don’t forget the secret weapon.” I added, before I was chivvied out of the gym with the other busybodying parents.

The small auditorium was packed out with kids and parents by the time I got back. It was right at the end of the school year, and most of the classes had prepared something for this recital. I stood at the back with some of the other dads, many of whom had video cameras. My whole body was aching with a sort of squirming dread. I wasn’t sure what I was going to do when Steffi came on. I had a feeling something terrible was going to happen. I’d been thrown off-kilter by what awful Halla had said, and was now looking around, scanning the room for anyone who would dare utter a word when Steffi took the stage. The first sigh of pity, the first nervous laugh and I swore heads would roll.

I wished you were there.

I found out where you were a moment later when the house lights darkened and you came out onto the stage. Just the sight of you was enough to calm my rapid breathing. You were met with a wave of applause and a few whoops from female voices.

“Hello everybody! Are you ready to see some fantastic moves?” Showbusiness suited you. “I’m afraid Principal Meanswell is away this weekend, so you will have to try and understand me.”

Cheering blended with sudden thumping europop which echoed through the speakers.

“Let’s go!” You hollered, and started leading some of the older kids in what I can only describe as a terrifying aerobics routine. My god you were impressive, though. You didn't hold back. Press ups, backflips, split jumps. What occurred to me then was just how amazingly unselfconscious you were. You weren’t falsely modest, just as you somehow weren’t an insufferable braggart. Your pure and genuine love for what you did radiated out of you and made everyone happy. Made everyone better. I’d felt it from you before I’d even met you. Back when you were little more than a stick-figure with drawn on muscles. I thought about how much time had passed, and how much had changed since I’d first felt the influence of that scribbled superhero. I thought of everything you’d done for Steffi, and I thought about how, through you, the two of us had rediscovered that there were things in life to look forward to.

The acts came on one-by-one after that. I can’t say I remember any of them particularly. I was never very good at caring about other people's’ children. And as the show continued, the tonic of your opener was starting to wear off and my nausea was returning. The world was closing in with every passing act.

And suddenly, there she was.

Steffi entered from stage left. I stopped breathing. She moved to the middle of the stage and arranged herself, bent forward like one of the swans in swan lake. The auditorium was deathly silent. I was primed. The slightest puff, the merest whisper and I was ready to fly at someone. Every muscle in my body was rigid with tension.

She had used the secret weapon, and her hair was sprayed neon pink.

The music started. It was a piece from the second half of the nutcracker. She already liked the music, but when I told her that her mother had been dancing in the ensemble of the nutcracker when we met, it sealed her decision. Even from this distance I could see the steel blast-doors engage, and her routine began.

I still didn't breathe. Every time her crutch made contact with the stage, it resonated in my teeth. When she raised her feet off the ground and swung her body round in a gorgeously controlled arc, for the moments she was suspended the music became a sawblade in my ear and my brain screamed.

Then she went for a move that I recognised. Engaging her crutches on the ground in front of her, she leaned forward on them and stretched her leg back far behind her. I watched the tremble in her elbows, and the flex of her back and then… one of the crutches slipped with a soft squeak.

I closed my eyes. I was a column of salt. I was a marble pillar. There was gasping in the auditorium and I was living in the tiny space between the last moment and this, terrified of what I would see when I opened my eyes.

I felt a hand slip into mine.

Impossible. Stone doesn’t have hands. But somehow I could feel it. The other hand was warm and firm and gave my palm a gentle squeeze. I could feel warmth near my shoulder, and then breath on my ear.

“You can look. She’s okay.” You whispered.

When I opened my eyes, Steffi was dancing again. She had recovered from whatever happened and was finishing her routine with a great swooping movement of her hand over her head, then using her arms, she eased herself down into the splits.

The last note of the music rippled in the thick air of the auditorium, before breaking, loosening, and drifting into serene silence.

Beginning at first like the pattering of rain on a window, the solid wall of applause that soon developed was like a howling tempest. It scared me at first, shaken to my very core as I was. And then a dam broke in me, and I started shouting too. Cheering while a monsoon of tears cascaded from my eyes. I know you wanted to clap, but you let me grip your hand for dear life. Her eyes found the pair of us, jumping and hooting like a pair of fools, and her face melted into the most enormous grin. Her eyes stayed on us while she did a dainty curtsy and then ambled offstage. 

She had a dazed, dreamy look in her eyes as she went, like at that moment she wasn’t on crutches, and nor indeed was she walking. She was soaring.


	9. Zeros and Ones

I come back to that moment over and over. And I wonder the same thing I’ve been given to wonder about you so many times; what were you thinking?

I suppose that’s what this is all about. I’m trying to understand. At the same time I’m trying to explain. There is so much you can’t possibly ever know about someone.

I don’t know if you’ll agree with that. In many ways your life is an open book, and your nature; giving and trusting to a fault, doesn’t chime with that rather pessimistic point of view. But I don’t mean to say you can never trust anyone, though I might have thought so at one point, only that you may never really understand why.

For example: I trust you.

I trust you because of that moment. Because I can close my eyes now and summon the memory of your hand entering mine. And in that memory I can rewind and pull back the camera and look at myself, a human cramped-muscle standing at the back of a school hall. I pull the camera back further and I think I see you, entering from the back of the auditorium. You might look around for a few moments before you spot me, and quietly you nudge through the cloud of dads until you’re standing next to me.

So you looked for me. Why did you do this? Well, you must have come into the auditorium at some point. Maybe you came in to watch the children in general, and not just Steffi. Maybe you hadn’t looked for me at all, but by coincidence found yourself standing next to me.

But either way, you saw me, and at the moment when my panic was most acute, you decided to take my hand. You didn’t give me a friendly nudge, or a pat on the shoulder, you took my hand.

And you let me hold your hand for the rest of the show.

The adrenaline from Steffi’s performance had me vibrating, and you stood there, solid and smiling like you’d always known it was going to be fine. My heart thumped hard while I pretended to be paying attention to the last few acts. I was expecting at any moment that you’d move away, or let go and take your hand back, but you held steady. It wasn’t until the last of the kids were performing that you leaned back over my shoulder and told me that you needed to go back on and close the show, then you gave my palm one more squeeze and breezed back the way you’d come.

I’d never been a hand-holder. Mine and Ella’s version of affection was a little more violent, and based around public humiliation than the average married couple. Our courtship, if you could call it that and not immediately throw up, contained a lot more cling-filming up doors and putting fireworks under toilet seats than moonlit strolls.

And even before that, I’d not exactly come from a huggy family. At least I hadn’t turned out quite as maladjusted as my brother, whose self-interest and narcissism outmatched any person I’d ever known or indeed heard of (except one or two Roman Emperors.) He’d certainly put me through my paces growing up; the two of us rattling round that big old house. He used to send me on all sorts of strange errands, the sorts of things I only came to understand the borderline illegality of much later on. And on more than one occasion I was obliged to take the blame for his shoplifting, on the grounds that shopkeepers are much more likely to forgive a 7-year-old than a spindly, hunched teenager in chin-to-toe leather.

I suppose in his way he looked after me, but I have to admit that common affection still threw me for something of a loop. As I watched you come back on stage and relay some information about upcoming fundraising raffles and other scholastic nonsense, my brain was still struggling to catch up with what had just happened and indeed -the 64 thousand dollar question- why.

Steffi rubbed most of her pink hairspray off on my shirt when she emerged into the auditorium. She gave me an immediate blow-by-blow account of every move, every half-turn and swish of her routine. She said she could barely see anything onstage, but could tell it was me standing at the back because of the way the light glittered off my watch chain. She didn’t say anything about having seen you, but there was a coyness about the way she broke off her monologue there that suggested she might have had more to say.

The rest of the evening passed in glimmering surreality as Steffi took my hand and dragged me between groups of her friends. I was tapped on the shoulder by multitudes of parents expressing everything from grudging approval to gushing insistences of my sainthood; if only they knew the density of my time I spent watching the Home Shopping Network.

It was just as the crowd started to thin and I caught a glimpse of the upholstered, candy-striped harpy heading my way that I ducked out of the auditorium into the adjoining hallway. I made the decision to call an end to all this socialising, grab Steffi and make a run for it. Turning to re-enter the room I was surprised to find myself face to face with you.

When I last saw you, you were doing press-ups with five preschoolers on your back.

“Are you leaving?” You asked.

I found I could barely look at you. There was a tingling in my hand where you’d touched me. I felt as though something in me had been chemically altered. My eyes flickered between you and the door, not able to find purchase, like trying to look into a bright light. Perhaps I feared that you’d read in me more than I wanted you to; all my sorry hopes and cloying feelings. I was almost angry. Why had you taken my hand? Was it just your instinct for kindness, or was it something else?

“Not just yet. Not without Steffi, at least. It’s all getting a bit ‘parent of the year’ in there, and I’ve got to go before somebody discovers the Tesco bags under the table. ” I replied. I went to re-enter the auditorium when you shifted. The slightest shift that suggested you didn’t believe we were quite done here. I looked at your face, you were wearing a strange expression, almost apologetic. “What’s the matter?”

The atmosphere began to fizz, like that night in the park when I could feel you were almost going to say something. There was something like danger in it. For that moment, stopped in my tracks, I was closer to you than I would normally stand. The proximity affected me like a gulp of strong drink; my fingertips numbed and a dart of heat flashed across my face. There was something happening here, and a short moment passed in which I scanned your eyelashes, your lips, your chin, and decided that I couldn't work out what exactly it was. Then you spoke. 

“Robbie, would you like to go out with me?”

I think I just gawped at you. 

Internally I had been reduced to a sequence of zeros and ones arranged in the shape of a surprised face. What my own face was doing was far, far beyond my control. You exhaled and nodded.

“Okay well, that’s alri-”

I panicked.

“No!”

Ah, no, wrong one!

“I mean yes.” I corrected. “I mean, what do you mean by... that?” You looked confused. I was confused. Even in a universe of infinite possibility in which I wasn’t a professional sad-sack with a pudgier waistline that I’d have liked, and you weren’t a beautiful muscular demigod who commanded the adoration of everybody who met you, this just didn’t strike me as plausible.

All the same, I think you were blushing.

“I mean that I would like to go on a date with you. If you want to.” You persevered.

“Seriously?”

You blinked at me.

“Yes.”

Oh god, this was really happening. This wasn’t some kind of hilarious mistranslation. For some reason I couldn’t get that drawing out of my head; the one Steffi had done of my alter-ego in that bridal lift. I almost laughed out loud.

Just about resisting the urge to jump into your arms, I opted instead for an attempt at composure.

“Then yes.” I said, forcing my soul back into my body, and my shoulders back into their resting position. “I would like to go... out… with you.” Appropriate that we were in a school, with the whole thing feeling so damned adolescent.

You smiled. You smiled your silly Sportaflop smile and I felt a small firecracker go off in my chest. You just looked so... happy.

What was going on today!?

When I finally got Steffi home, after having to physically pick her up and remove her from her excited and overtired friends, she fell asleep on me as we watched some Home Makeover show on TV. I took a moment to reflect on the day’s events.

“Ella.” I whispered. “You are not going to believe the day we’ve had.”

Silently I told her about Steffi’s worries the night before, about my immature behavior towards that awful Halla woman. I told her about the secret weapon, and in all the fine detail I could recall I told her how Steffi had danced like a fairy fucking princess. Then I imagined the way she would have laughed, snorting like a rhinoceros, when I told her that you had asked me out.

And I had said yes.

I drifted off to sleep in the chair, while your face, and Ella’s laugh, and the ugly wallpaper on the television all blurred into comforting darkness.


	10. Letter

God, I’m sorry about this.

My letter turned into a novel, and I know you’re not much of a reader. But there are things here that I think you need to know.

For the last few months I’ve been filled with a sort of existential terror, you see, and it has nothing to do with you. Except that I suppose it has everything to do with you.

Do you remember how the first time you tried to kiss me I dumped scalding water on you? It wasn’t even our first date, which was quite how pathetically clammed-up I was inside. Christ, I don’t even think it was our fifth. You’d look at me expectantly every time before we parted ways, and that crackle of silence would whizz through the air and then… Well, bye. We wouldn’t kiss, we’d barely touch!

I would then go home and think about nothing but kissing you. I would replay certain moments and think ‘Boy, wouldn’t it have been nice to have kissed you then?’ And then go about my day as though that were completely normal.

I also had a desperate need in those early days to keep whatever was happening here away from Steffi. Certain as I was that you’d suss me out and disappear any minute now, it didn’t seem fair to get her hopes up. Which was insane, because smart child as Steffi has always been, she inevitably knew everything. Her Lazytown stories really kicked up in volume, too, clearly finding inspiration following her triumph at the recital. They were coming every couple of days, and the scope was larger and more ambitious than before. They were building rockets and going to the moon, or hunting ghosts, or exploring ancient pyramids.

The day I'm talking about was the first evening you actually came to the house. Bessie had invited Steffi over to hers for a couple of hours to do some scrap-booking and I took the opportunity to attempt to make you dinner.

I say 'attempt' because you know what happened to that plan.

I was in front of the stove telling you about how the process of marking dissertations was slowly killing me, when I heard you laugh close behind me. Closer than I'd anticipated. You put a hand on my hip and turned me gently towards you. We stayed like that for a couple of seconds, your face inches from mine, and then you leaned in.

The involuntary muscle spasm in my arm as I jerked away knocked the pan of boiling pasta onto the floor. You yelped as some of it splashed onto your front. Oh god, just remembering it now makes me flinch.

A shutter of self-loathing closed around me then. I couldn’t stop apologising, no matter how many times you reassured me that you were okay. You removed your shirt to reveal a patch of skin now scalded violently pink. You told me to go and get a damp cloth, and we sat on the living room floor as you took it from me, and hissed through your teeth as you applied it to the burn.

This wasn’t how I’d hoped to get you shirtless in my house.

“Is this how you normally react to being kissed.” You asked, while I guiltily sulked on the floor opposite you.

“No. I don’t know.” I replied, not looking anywhere. Especially not at your shoulders.

“Don’t you like to be kissed?” You continued, your tone neutral but your words cutting to the quick. “Or is it that you don’t want to be kissed by me?”

It wasn’t either. But I was in no place to be able to communicate this to you. That I wanted to kiss you more than anything. That I thought about it almost constantly. Yet something in me was deathly frightened. 

“It’s not that.” I said. “I can’t explain it. If you kiss me something awful is going to happen.”

“It’s not that bad, it’s just a little burn.” You soothed. I shook my head.

“You don’t understand.” I swallowed, and tried to work out how to phrase this. If you kissed me, I was definitely going to fall irrevocably in love with you, and that could only be an omen of terrible things to come.

“Is it because of… your wife?” You asked.

I was startled. I didn’t know what to say. I suppose it was.

“I’m, uhh… God, I don’t know.” One of my hands had started to twitch. I held it by my side so you wouldn’t notice. “I don’t think I’m the right person for you. I’m a big mess. I haven’t been with anyone for… six years. I don’t even know if I can anymore.”

Your expression changed. You looked hurt. There was something incredibly vulnerable about the way I could read your feelings so easily. Why didn't you just conceal them like every other repressed, unhappy adult on the planet?

“It’s not because of you." I continued. "You’re perfect. God, Sport, you’re… embarrassingly beautiful. What the hell do you want with someone like me?”

You chuckled. Why? Why were you smiling?

“Don’t you know?” You asked, clearly surprised. Amused. You waited for me to respond and I just couldn’t. This was another riddle and an impossible one at that.

You exhaled. And then you spoke.

“When I moved here, it was really crazy, I’ve never lived around so many people. I come from a very small town in Iceland. There was nothing. Nothing but boats, and snow.”

This was new. You didn’t talk about yourself much at all, a quality I had noticed over these last few weeks.

“And my father, he was a very popular man in my town. Everybody looked up to him. He was a very great man. For my whole life until I was - I don’t know - 25 I only ever spoke to the same people. And they all knew that I was Íþró’s son. I was Íþró number 10, and I was going to be the same as him. A great man.

“But I… I wasn’t the same as him. He was a great leader, he always knew what to do. Anything. Didn’t matter the subject. He was always right. And more than anything I didn’t want to disappoint him. So I never told him I was gay. It didn’t seem like the sort of thing that he would have thought was right. And he was always right, so…

“And then he died. And the whole town went to his funeral, even the mayor. And I had to say something. But I couldn’t. Everybody said that it was so good that Íþró had a son to carry everything on.They asked me to take his place on the town council. There was this big… Pabbi-shaped hole in the town, and everyone was saying to me ‘you have to fill it’... and I couldn’t do it. I wasn’t the person who they thought I was. I was just a kid who used to take a plane to Reykjavik once every two months and sleep with strangers. And they were saying ‘settle down, Íþró, continue the line! There’s always been an Íþró here. We need number 11.’”

Your blue eyes gazed at the carpet while you crossed back into your memories. I remembered the face that peered out from every wall of your apartment. The expectation and the certainty. He looked like you, but with all the juice squeezed out.

“It was… my mother who rescued me. Things were closing in, and I didn’t want to let people down. They said I should marry so I got engaged. They said I should sit on the council so I did. And then one day she said ‘If you need for us to go, we can go.’ I asked her ‘don’t you want to stay in Pabbi’s house? Aren’t these your friends?’ and she said ‘I don’t care about these people. I care about you. And I think you need to get out of this town.’ And so we sold the house, and we came here.

“So, I’m not such a good person after all. But you…” You looked up at me now, you smiled sadly.

“Not very long after I began teaching at the school, Steffi started telling me these stories. And she would draw all these brilliant pictures. They were about her friends, and me... and you. She’d show them to me and say ‘Robbie is so funny’ or ‘Robbie is so smart’, and she’d write about how you could sometimes be grumpy or lazy, but how in the end you were just a big softie. And I know that every little girl looks up to her papa, but I didn’t know anybody here… and through these stories I started to feel like I sort of knew you.”

“And when I finally met you… and saw you watch Steffi dancing for the first time... I knew right away that you must be a really great man. And I very much wanted to be your friend-”

You had to stop there. I had to cut your monologue short. You needed to stop talking at that moment because I had to kiss you immediately.

Somewhere while listening to you, obvious, unimportant things like time and space had dissolved. My heart, which had been thudding shallowly and anxiously, suddenly began to thump in grand, echoing waves which I could feel rippling all through my body. The pulse in my brain lit fuses in all my senses and I needed to feel you more than I’d needed a single thing for six long, contact-starved years.

This is how on the living room floor I leaned into you, and for the first time pressed my lips against yours. How your arm wound around my back, and your stubble scraped my chin. How my fingers finally found their longed-for place, tangled in the hair on the nape of your neck

This is how you saved me from everything that I had done to myself.

And this leads me to the point.

I feel like there are still so many things you don’t know about me. But this is a start. I’ve tried to be honest and thorough, possibly too thorough, in recounting all the things that happened between us. All the ways you may have misunderstood who I am, and what I’m really like.

It’s been five years and eleven months. In a month I will have been with you for longer than I lived that terrible shadow of a life, paddling desperately for my and Steffi’s survival. I can tell you immediately which span of time has gone quicker.

I also feel like since you’ve been in my life there’s never been a moment’s peace. The time whistled by in a flurry of track-meets, snow days, dubious vegetarian cooking and resentful morning Yoga sessions. 

I finished my book, more years overdue than it was supposed to take to write the damn thing in the first place. You know Sterling, the student I’d been having trouble with on the day we first met, got in touch with me recently to tell me that he thought my book was shallow and under-researched. I think he’s living in Monaco now, doing something to do with Hedge Funds. I hope it suits him better than literary theory.

It's crazy that Steffi’s a teenager now, and doesn’t write her stories anymore. More’s the pity, because I used to read them and take a sort of comfort in the fact that no matter what happened in the real world, things would always be colourful in Lazytown. She approves, by the way. I discussed this whole thing with her last week and she just rolled her eyes at me, like Ella would have done, and wondered why I was going to put myself through this. She asked me why I had to be so dramatic and couldn’t just ask you outright.

Which brings me back round to the point.

I had to somehow let you know everything, so there will be no misunderstanding. So you know exactly what you’ll be getting yourself into. I’m not going to hide a thing from you. It wouldn’t be fair.

But if you read this and you decide that you’re okay with all of… this. All of this nonsense. This ridiculous story about a clinically depressed man who fell in love with a cartoon character drawn by his child, who turned out not to be a cartoon character at all, but something much less realistic than that.

If you’re okay with that, then there’s only one thing more I need to ask you.

Will you marry me?

Love,

Robbie

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Thanks to everyone who reads this. It's been a little bit like exorcising a demon. But a beautifully refreshing experience all the same.
> 
> Here's to fluffy romance, and rejecting cynicism wherever we can.


End file.
